This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented, or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Traditional designs for computer racks have cables on a single tailstock. If cooling fans are integrated in a drawer, the fans are typically located at the other end of the drawer, the far end from the cable plug and cable exit locations. This is particularly true when the cable ends contain active elements that require cooling.
Limitations of this type of drawer configuration include limiting the number of standard-sized cables that can be used in any given drawer. The typical alternatives would be to employ specially designed cables which would be cost prohibitive or to use double-sized drawers which would then would increase the overall volume of computing equipment, which again could become a cost issue.
In order to double the number of cables per drawer without incurring the costs and other limitations noted above, cables have been arranged on both tailstocks and fans have been arranged inside the drawer between the tailstock and the switch chips or other computing electronics. However, this arrangement increases the distances from the switch chips to the cable ends. In future designs with higher signaling rates such an increase in the distance between the cable ends to switch chip may not be possible because, for instance, of the channel loss problems that arise from longer length of card trace between the cable end and the computing elements inside the drawer.
The current invention moves beyond the current techniques and/or materials.
Abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined in the text where appropriate.